Quotes by Scottish Authors - Page 25

The daily chocolate left Will in high spirits, so that some days he believed he could wheel with the gulls that fished the foaming water close to shore. Now that he felt so free, it came to him that the corner of England, which up till now had been his whole universe, was in fact only a scrap of a boundless realm.
Sara Sheridan
A journey is an achievement, Maria, just as much as a mathematical proof.
Sara Sheridan
She enjoyed the sights and sounds of the dockside – ports were places of freedom.
Sara Sheridan
Her eyes betrayed no shock at the sights of the quay as they unfolded – not the sweating deckhands, the prostitutes crowding the ship, the hubbub of stalls, including one where three slaves were for sale, their ankles manacled. She might as well have been walking through a country garden as she moved inexorably away from the water.
Sara Sheridan
The jungle is alive. It’s dangerous as a living nightmare and brimful of hostility.
Sara Sheridan
The moon was low but not full. The men set out along the dock in conversation. As they dropped onto the dark beach, Simmons declared, ‘There can be no better place in the world than this.’Henderson had to agree. The beach was beautiful. The stars lit the sand and balmy air rode in as the waves washed up on paradise
Sara Sheridan
It had occurred to her many times that on board it didn’t matter where you were coming from or where you were heading. Each voyage had its own charisma. Like writing a book – word by word – or crossing a country – step by step – each minute had to be lived moment by moment.
Sara Sheridan
No baggage - there was the secret of existence.
Robert Louis Stevenson
There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.
Robert Louis Stevenson
I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.
Robert Louis Stevenson
To be honest, to be kind - to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends but these without capitulation - above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself - here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy. He has an ambitious soul who would ask more; he has a hopeful spirit who should look in such an enterprise to be successful.
Robert Louis Stevenson
How kind you are, North Wind!''I am only just. All kindness is but justice. We owe it.
George MacDonald
Kindness was too painful. It had been a long time since he had had to endure it.
Sara Sheridan
At length, when I considered it, I realized that the best of my actions were small things. Picking flowers and cooking food for my mother when she had been unwell, spending an afternoon with the children, sending money to my sister or kissing Henry’s tiny head as he slept in the nursery before I left. I thought of every detail and afterwards I felt better. Hellfire and brimstone have never appealed to me and I admit I become easily confused thinking of right and wrong. But I do understand kindness.
Sara Sheridan
What has she done to deserve such scorn?' I said. He had the grace to look uncomfortable as he answered. 'Not her in particular, miss,' he said, 'Just her sort. People like her in general, I mean.''Oh Harry,' I said, 'there is no such thing as people in general. Everyone is someone very particular.
Catriona McPherson
You must rely on reason and science,” she said, “and be guided by a likewise rational ethic of human concern. You must do your utmost as individuals to improve your understanding, ability and compassion.
Ken MacLeod
There is nothing in nature which approximates to the idea of a hospice.
Jim Crumley
Narrow all your interests until your mind, heart, and body are focused on Jesus Christ.
Oswald Chambers
No man by mere high human wisdom would dare undertake a step for Jesus’ sake unless he knows that the Holy Spirit has directly spoken to him; and until He comes, I shall not go.
Oswald Chambers
You will never find Jesus so precious, as when the world is one vast howling wilderness. Then He is like a rose blooming in the midst of the desolation, or a rock rising above the storm! Do not set your hearts on any of the flowers of this world. They shall all fade and die. Prize the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley. Jesus never changes! Live nearer to Christ than to any person on this earth; so that when they are taken away, you may have Him to love and lean upon. “Yes, He is altogether lovely. This is my Beloved, and this is my Friend!” (Song of Solomon 5:16)
Robert Murray McCheyne
There is much in our Lord's pantry that will satisfy his children, and much wine in his cellar that will quench all their thirst. Hunger for him until he fills you. He is pleased with the importunity of hungry souls. If he delays, do not go away, but fall a-swoon at his feet. Every day we may see some new thing in Christ. His love has neither brim nor bottom. How blessed are we to enjoy this invaluable treasure, the love of Christ; or rather allow ourselves to be mastered and subdued in his love, so that Christ is our all, and all other things are nothing. O that we might be ready for the time our Lord's wind and tide call for us! There are infinite plies in his love that the saint will never be able to unfold. I urge upon you a nearer and growing communion with Christ. There are curtains to be drawn back in Christ that we have never seen. There are new foldings of love in him. Dig deep, sweat, labour, and take pains for him, and set by as much time in the day for him as you can; he will be won with labour. Live on Christ's love. Christ's love is so kingly, that it will not wait until tomorrow, it must have a throne all alone in your soul. It is our folly to divide our narrow and little love. It is best to give it all to Christ. Lay no more on the earthly, than it can carry. Lay your soul and your weights upon God; make him your only and best-beloved. Your errand in this life is to make sure an eternity of glory for your soul, and to match your soul with Christ. Your love, if it could be more than all the love of angels in one, would be Christ's due. Look up to him and love him. O, love and live! My counsel is, that you come out and leave the multitude, and let Christ have your company. Let those who love this present world have it, but Christ is a more worthy and noble portion; blessed are those who have him.
Samuel Rutherford
To see what God is like, we must look at Jesus. He perfectly represents God to men in a form which they can see and know and understand.
William Barclay
Paul was devoted to a Person, not a cause.
Oswald Chambers
She was simply a young woman who believed that the man called Jesus Christ is a real person, such as those represent him who profess to have known him; and she therefore believed the man himself—believed that, when he said a thing, he entirely meant it, knowing it to be true; believed, therefore, that she had no choice but do as he told her. That man was the servant of all; therefore, to regard any honest service as degrading would be, she saw, to deny Christ, to call the life of creation's hero a disgrace. Nor was he the first servant; he did not of himself choose his life; the Father gave it him to live--sent him to be a servant, because he, the Father, is the first and greatest servant of all.
George MacDonald
You may often have to watch Jesus Christ wreck a life before He saves it.
Oswald Chambers
He was without any comforts of God — no feeling that God loved him — nofeeling that God pitied him — no feeling that God supported him. God was hissun before — now that sun became all darkness… He was without God — hewas as if he had no God. All that God had been to him before was taken fromhim now. He was Godless — deprived of his God. He had the feeling of thecondemned, when the Judge says: “Depart from me, ye cursed,” “who shallbe punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord andfrom the glory of his power.” He felt that God said the same to him. Ah! This isthe hell which Christ suffered. The ocean of Christ’s sufferings isunfathomable… He was forsaken in the [place] of sinners. If you close with himas your surety, you will never be forsaken… “My God, my God, why hast thouforsaken me?” [The answer?] For me — for me.
Robert Murray McCheyne
Strange star-like object over Oslo right before Obama arrives. A gift of a golden medal given by a group of wise men... Nah.
Craig Ferguson
I tried talking to Jesus, but he just put me on hold...
Colin Hay
If sympathy is all that human beings need, then the Cross of Christ is an absurdity and there is absolutely no need for it. What the world needs is not "a little bit of love," but major surgery. If you think you are helping lost people with your sympathy and understanding, you are a traitor to Jesus Christ. You must have a right-standing relationship with Him yourself, and pour your life out in helping others in His way— not in a human way that ignores God.
Oswald Chambers
All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men.
Thomas Carlyle
These hapless livers were probably not always mere myths, and these legends which traced their spilt blood in the purple bloom of the violet, the scarlet stain of the anemone, or the crimson flush or the rose were no idle poetic emblem of youth and beauty fleeting as the Summer flowers.
Sir George James Frazer
The hollowness in his chest, the tense yearning, the loneliness he braces against, every morning until he can immerse himself in work and forget. Not love. Something else, something with a power that endures. Not love, but a memory of love.
Aminatta Forna
At the time he had closed in upon himself, denying her a place of entry. She was tenacious, aggressive as a lover, had tried to prise the pieces of him apart. Only when she failed had she finally let go, by then months had passed. She loved like she was going to war, but she was also not the kind of woman to wait for a man. Valiant in battle, noble in defeat. She walked away and never looked back
Aminatta Forna
How easily they spoke of love. And yet, when she'd needed the certainty of his feeling for her, he'd let her slip away, never able to bring himself to tell her about the ways in which he'd been changed. He'd been incapable he'd let Nenebah believe the problem lay with her.
Aminatta Forna
And afterwards, if you had asked any of the survivors how they had managed it, they would not have been able to tell you. It was as if those days in the forest, the escape to the city, had passed in a trance. The mind creates an alternative state.
Aminatta Forna
Never be afraid when God brings back your past. Let your memory have its way with you. It is a minister of God bringing its rebuke and sorrow to you.
Oswald Chambers
I'm in my 40s and I'm constantly surprised by how much my childhood still plays a part in my life.
Sara Sheridan
Nothing is long ago in an archive, my dear. In the records we treat the dead as same as the living.
that’s the whole point of keeping papers. It doesn’t matter if it’s a hundred years or only a few weeks. It’s all filed away, fresh as the day it went under the covers.
Sara Sheridan
Didn’t young people care what the generation before them had achieved? And if not, why had everyone gone through those grim difficult wartime years?
Sara Sheridan
It was nearly ten years since the peace though her memories of the war still felt fresh.
Sara Sheridan
A man’s real possession is his memory. In nothing else is he rich, in nothing else is he poor.
Alexander Smith
Yet what use against the deceit of a state are the memories of a child?
Aminatta Forna
But, of course, memory and responsibility are strangers. They're foreign to each other. Memory always goes its own way quite regardless.
Ali Smith
The instant is not in time -- time is in the instant.
John Barbour
Tonight I can smell the season the way it's usually only possible to at the very first moments of its return, before you're used to it, when you've forgotten its smell, then there it is back in the air and the flow of things shifting and resettling again.
Ali Smith
People who care nothing for their country's stories and songs,' he said, 'are like people without a past- without a memory- they are half people
Alasdair Gray
Why should I laugh?' asked the old man. 'Madness in youth is true wisdom. Go, young man, follow your dream, and if you do not find the happiness that you seek, at any rate you will have had the happiness of seeking it.
Andrew Lang
Well at ease are the Sleepers for whom Existence is a shallow Dream.
Thomas Carlyle
Worship is giving God the best that He has given you. Be careful what you do with the best you have, Whenever you get a blessing from God, give it back to Him as a love gift. Take time to meditate before God and offer the blessing back to Him in a deliberate act of worship.
Oswald Chambers
Living like this is a full-time business.
Irvine Welsh
The interest of [businessmen] is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public ... The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ... ought never to be adopted, till after having been long and carefully examined ... with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men ... who have generally an interest to deceive and even oppress the public
Adam Smith
Bit it's what bein a hard man is aw aboot; its a journey, a fucking self destructive quest tae find yir limits, cause they fuckin limits eywis come in the form ay a harder man. A big. strong, stiff hard man whae can dae it for ye, whae can teach ye, show ye whaire ye stand, where yir fuckin parameters ur.
Irvine Welsh
Most fellas like the races, though, Miss. It’s only human nature
Sara Sheridan
an utter walkover with a man who can pen a pretty email
Mhairi McFarlane
Men like fun much more than they like clever
Mhairi McFarlane
All the real blokes I know are obsessed with cars and have started doing cycling at the weekend and being really, really boring about it and banging on about their Fitbits and growing stupid beards and talking about being on Tinder. That's what all the 'real men' are like these days!
Jenny Colgan
The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, Gang aft agley.An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, For promis'
Robert Burns
I didn't expect to love being online as much as I do. I've met some wonderful people and discovered that however arcane some of my interests that there are people out there who are interested too.
Sara Sheridan
The curve of my waist in a tight fitting summer dress can really make me new friends.
Sara Sheridan
That’s what friends are for,” Sheba
Ronald Frame